Seven Bathers

In 1900 three of Cézanne's paintings hung at the world's fair in Paris, in the Grand Palais survey of a hundred years of French art. The critic Roger Marx had pushed to get them in, and that July Cézanne posted him some biographical details for the catalogue from Aix. He was 61 by then and had been painting groups of bathers on and off for 30 years, working without models. His dealer Ambroise Vollard said women intimidated him. Cézanne told the younger painter Émile Bernard that he fell back on drawings from his student days and on studies he had made after sculpture in the Louvre. So the seven figures here by the water were assembled out of paper. The dark lines running through the trees and across the bodies are contours he kept redrawing and then left where they fell.